Hunkemöller is Europe’s leading and fastest-growing lingerie brand, with over 900 stores across 25 countries. The company was founded in Amsterdam in 1886 and has since developed into a pan-European omnichannel retailer that integrates technology into every aspect of the business.
The customer journey is at the heart of Hunkemöller’s strategy, which has resulted in a seamless interaction between ecommerce and stationary retail through its ‘click2brick’ initiatives.
As a thriving retail and ecommerce fashion business, Hunkemöller has many different messages to promote and share with its customers. This presented a challenge, as too many competing emails were being sent, at a frequency of three or four per week, per customer. The emails were not well targeted. The reason? In part because Hunkemöller mainly segmented customers based on previous purchases. But also because of not sending emails at optimal times for each customer.
As a result, conversions and revenue were below target; their email open rate was dropping over the years; and A/B testing was not achieving the expected results. Time for a change. With the expertise of their agency, Clever Strategy, Hunkemöller relied on Marigold Engage to reach the following key business goals:
We are seeing additional revenue, not just by sending out more volume, but by sending the right content to the right customer. Revenue per thousand emails sent increased dramatically, because the content is becoming more relevant to the customers.
Anneke Uiterweerd
CRM and Loyalty Project Manager, Hunkemöller
Working with agency Clever Strategy, Hunkemöller put the power of AI to work, beginning with Smart Audiences, a feature within Marigold Recommendations, the platform’s AI-powered engine. Smart Audiences improves targeting by automatically identifying and selecting the best customer profiles for specific content and offers, based on web interaction history, purchase history, and product interest. Hunkemöller was able to define many different product collections and categories, and by segmenting their audience and focusing on the right messages to the right customers, their campaigns became much more targeted, leading to more conversions.
But targeting the right audience was only part of the solution. Sending the right offer to the right customer at the right time was also crucial. Selligent’s Send Time Optimization (STO) feature allowed Hunkemöller to know when a customer is most likely to open and read a communication – and then adapt the sending time to the customer profile, to reach every individual customer at the perfect time.
Clever Strategy is an agency providing strategic outputs in accountable marketing. Consisting of clever strategist marketing nuts, Clever Strategy takes a modern approach to marketing, embracing the current technological revolution to help clients achieve measurable results and realize growth. By utilizing creative marketing media strategies and state-of-the-art IT development techniques, Clever Strategy is able to achieve maximum returns on investments in campaigns, e-commerce environments, and e-loyalty programs. Learn more at cleverstrategy.nl.
Using AI to improve audience targeting and optimize send time proved to be the right path forward for Hunkemöller. Together with Clever Strategy, the brand used the AI power of Marigold Engage to achieve stellar improvements. Compared to six previous Hunkemöller campaigns, this new approach generated increased revenue and engagement, with specific results attributable to Smart Audiences and STO.
STO also made possible some key analyses of interactions, helping the company to understand the impact of specific periods (like sales, COVID-19, change of hours) on shopper engagement.
“Smart Audiences really helped us to define the right target audience, while STO got our emails to them at the ideal time when they were ready to interact,” said Beaudine Grand, Customer Journey Marketeer for Hunkemöller. “The Selligent Team is always very helpful and enthusiastic about working with us to not only achieve the results, but to monitor and evaluate the campaigns. We enjoy working with all of them.”
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